[3] The above remark as to the jubilee-volume needs to be explained
and justified. In it there is an important essay on each of the great
provinces of Weismann, Mendel and de Vries, and in each of these the
highest living exponent speaks, Professors Weismann, Bateson and de
Vries. Bateson expresses admiration for Weismann’s destructive work,
but shows plainly that he holds it to have failed in its fundamental
purpose. Nevertheless, by a neat _tour d’addresse_ he adopts
Weismann’s uncompromising attitude on the inheritance of acquired
characters, which happens to agree exceedingly well with his own
scheme. He has but one insignificant reference to de Vries on p. 95
where he finds help for his doctrine.
Weismann makes no reference to Mendel or de Vries. De Vries makes
none to Weismann or Mendel, but without stating it in his essay he
is known to be in opposition to Weismann’s dogma on the inheritance
of acquired characters. These three eminent biologists would
thus seem to have worked on diverging lines. The two first agree
heartily, Weismann explicitly and Bateson by implication, as to the
forbidden doctrine, “on the ground that it closes the way to deeper
insight”--in other words their mutually destructive theories. So it
stands thus in the book--Weismann throws over Lamarck, Mendel and de
Vries; Bateson throws over Weismann (as again in 1914) and de Vries;
de Vries ignores Weismann and Mendel.
Dr. Lock in his book on Variation, Heredity and Evolution, 1906,
says that Weismann practically ignores the evidence of Mendelism in
heredity, and adds, p. 261, “But at the next step the Mendelian parts
company with Weismann.”
One cannot avoid noticing, incidentally, that the vast mass of work
of the biometricians led by Galton, Weldon and Professor Karl Pearson
is conspicuously absent from the book. Prof. J. Arthur Thomson says
that there should be no opposition between Mendelian and Galtonian
formulæ, “they are correlated, and ultimately they will be seen in
complete harmony as different aspects of the same phenomena. But it
is simply muddleheadedness which can find any opposition between a
statistical formula applicable to averages of successive generations
breeding freely, and a physiological formula applicable to particular
sets of cases where parents with contrasted dominant and recessive
characters are crossed and their hybrid offspring are inbred.”(a)
concerning which see the Preface to Bateson’s _Mendel’s Principles of
Heredity_, 1902, with remarks on some of the Galtonians.
(a) _Heredity_, p. 374.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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